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MAPLE LEAGUE REPORTS
Open to everyone, the Maple League Book Club has been a source of ongoing long-term reflection and conversation.
BOOK CLUB
During the fall Book Club we usually address issues of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Accessibility and Decolonization. In the winter, we explore a specific aspect of Teaching & Learning, and finally in the summer book club we explore the challenges of academic life more broadly.
Fall 2023 Speakers and Dates
SUMMER 2025
Higher Expectations: How to Survive Academia, Make it Better for Others, and Transform the University.
by Roberta Hawkins and Leslie Kern
This book is a practical guide to navigating academia for people who want to improve their own day-to-day work lives and create better conditions for everyone. Universities are broken: they’re built on systems that are discriminatory, hierarchical, and individualistic. But we can raise our expectations. By drawing on real-world examples, Higher Expectations offers concrete advice on how to make positive institutional transformations real.
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Summer (June-July) 2025
Fall 2023 Speakers and Dates
PAST BOOK CLUBS
Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It
by James M. Lang
In Distracted, Lang rethinks the practice of teaching, revealing how educators can structure their classrooms less as distraction-free zones and more as environments where they can actively cultivate their students' attention. Brimming with ideas and grounded in new research, Distracted offers an innovative plan for the most important lesson of all: how to learn.
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Winter (Feb-Apr) 2025
Podcast Pedagogies
Last fall we hosted a Podcast Club!
We listened and discussed the power of podcasting, student led learning, conscious classrooms, social and environmental justice and community building, AI in education, and finally rest is resistance/faculty burnout.
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Fall (Sep-Nov) 2024​
Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities and Other Organizations for Human Flourishing
by Dr. Jessica Riddell
How do we model abundance and generosity - in teaching, in learning, in leading organizations, particularly non-profits - when dealing with fiscal austerity and other forms of scarcity thinking? Hope Circuits explores this question, presenting sophisticated ideas that support democratizing higher education for everybody.
Spring (May-Jul) 2024​
Undoing the Grade: Why we Grade and How We Stop
by Jesse Stommel
This book examines the what, why, and whether of grades, revealing how the traditional grading system is can stifle genuine learning and student growth. This book champions for innovative and alternative models of assessment that puts priority on meaningful student development and engagement over simple numerical grades.
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Winter (Feb-Apr) 2024​​
Academic Ableism:
Disability and Higher Education
by Jay Timothy Dolmage
Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education. The author argues that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all.
Fall (Sep-Nov) 2023​